Spiderthreads
by Akazukin Elle
Summary: There is nothing so quiet as ice.


SPIDERTHREADS  
  
And when the morning came the tears that had dried on her cheeks crumbled like dust into the air, and she got out of bed and knelt in front of the toilet and threw up, and she washed her face as she felt blindly into the medicine cabinet for her headache pills. The water she rinsed her mouth with was piercing with coldness. Her feet were dirty; she stuck one leg into the bathtub and turned the water onto cold.  
  
She found that she could not stand on one foot long enough to wash her feet and stumbled out of the bathroom, vomit on her breath and in her nose and on her hands. It was not quite dawn outside and she hadn't actually slept at all, only for an hour or two, but that was to be expected, wasn't it? Her toenails were ragged and the almost-mud she hadn't washed off in the bathroom stained the pale carpets darkly.  
  
She had once thought that her heart pumped fire through her veins, blue-white-hot fire that scorched the earth without sentimentality, but now she knew her heart for what it was, and her heart pumped ice, and when she breathed in the chilly cold morning her breath did not freeze so noticeably and she knew.  
  
It was all ice. The fire had left her long ago with the raising of the glass points in the city, rising like perfect icebergs into the sky's deep ocean and the sky's deep night, reflected on the deep cold ocean like icicles hanging from the stars --  
  
She missed the starfire, and the depth of the night.  
  
Nothing was so beautiful as her fire had been, bright and blazing and it told you things if only you'd listen and she had listened for so long, listened so hard that it seemed as though the fire would bare its secrets to her and it had, oh, it had and she'd been so in love with it that she'd wanted to say so much -- and then it had dried up into dust and left her for ever. She had been left with the secrets and the dust and the crystal peaks in the sky and then those things had all seemed so empty.  
  
It had been the hollow horse of Troy and if she'd have known she'd have run far away, past the ends of the galaxy or perhaps just to its edges where she'd have had peace.  
  
Now all that she had was a hangover and stained white carpets and dust and she was sick of it all in a way that was all-consuming. She was sick of being asked if she was all right, sick of being poked at by doctors and prodded at by her less-than-certified friends and whispered over as though she didn't know. It wasn't that she always heard them, but the firesecrets she'd been keeping were with her and she whispered them to herself sometimes, to remind herself of heat and beauty and destruction; of death and life, and the most-important in-between.  
  
She stood in her kitchen, too sick to turn on the radio or to put water on to boil, and she stared out the window with her arms crossed over her stomach and remembered. She closed her eyes against it but she couldn't close her head -- and she'd prayed and prayed to close her head on many occasions, but her prayers, like the fire, were unanswered, or perhaps unanswering -- and the words rang in her ears like sharp gunshots stammering against her windows.  
  
The scent of smoke still clung to her hair and floated around her hazily, musky and tantalizing and teasing; and when she breathed she found that it almost tasted like a lady's perfume, and that it reminded her of static electricity and papercuts and moonlight through the crystalglass windows, and that it was strung through her senses like a child's string.  
  
The remnants always remained and it seemed somehow very clever of her to think it, as though she were the first one to make that brilliant conclusion. There was something hard in the air and it shattered and she thought of the words and it made her throw up again, coughing over the kitchen sink, heaving, half-sobbing, throat raw and stomach cramping. They felt like a windshield that had just been hit the wrong way with gravel and as she rinsed her mouth again, and her hands, too, this time, scrubbing them with dish detergent and then scrubbing her face and dark eyes free of dust, she rolled them over her acidburnt tongue.  
  
I  
  
(can't stand the way you said it to me so casually and it's burning me up to ashes, ashes, and I)  
  
am  
  
(slowly going quiet and crazy and the fire has forgotten me and oh, if there was any kind of god he'd strike me down and it's been a thousand years without the stars to guide me and if there is one thing I'm)  
  
not  
  
(it's sane so screw all of you whispering behind my back and wondering when I'll hang myself from the rafters because we can all see it coming, all of us but Serenity who seems to think everything's fine and maybe it is but I can't even think about her without taking another sip and suddenly I'm supposed to be this woman)  
  
in  
  
(control of my own life and how can I be in control when everything, everything is bleak and empty and it's not dark but the glass filters the sunlight until it's all bland, like living inside a dreamworld cracked by cobwebs on the ceiling, cracked by gaps in the glass, and you think that I)  
  
love  
  
(you as though you know everything about me, and you can just smile benevolently and tell me things I already know, and you're so -patronizing-, I just can't stand it, and if I'm your best friend then why don't you talk to me anymore -- you talk to them and sit with them, with him, with them and him but never with me, why would you invite crazy me and I wouldn't accept, but you never even invite me to talk)  
  
with  
  
(you and tell me about your marriage, because I'd really like to hear about it, what else did I ever want but to see you happy, which is strange because I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate)  
  
you.  
  
  
  
(fin)  
  
  
  
Author's Note: That just kicked all the rules of grammar in the teeth, but I felt like I needed to write it. It's sort of femmeslash, but mainly just Rei, as a thousand years might etch her. (I'm feeling poetic tonight, although the above blatantly wasn't.) Anyway, if you've stayed with me even after I disregarded all of my style book's rules for sentence structure, thank you -- and I would love, love, love some commentary on this one. Uh... happy Easter? 


End file.
